21 Sep 2026 17 min read Karma's Most Wanted

Do the Wrong Thing.

The verdict of history is that they were villains. The verdict of their own lifetimes, delivered by everyone in a position to do anything about it, was that they were survivors, and in more than one case they were considered great men, heroes even.

1930's mobster with a Tommy gun.

A Machiavellian guide to power, assembled entirely from the record.

You were raised on a bad dataset. “Do the right thing,” they said.

Somebody told you that the truth comes out, that cheaters get caught, that what goes around comes around. They told you this because they needed you to behave, and because the stories we keep are the ones that make behaving look honorable. The pilot who lands between the rifles and the helpless villagers. The night watchman who finds the tape on the door, and brings down a crooked president. We love those men. We put them on plaques, eventually, usually after the funeral. The keyword there is eventually.

Nobody runs the other side of the ledger, though.

What follows is not a moral argument. Every claim in it is documented and none of it is in dispute. Treat it as an operations manual, because that is what the record actually is.

Rule One: Do It All At Once

In 317 BC, a potter's son named Agathocles was serving as general and guardian of the peace in Syracuse. He invited the city's leading men to a meeting. When they arrived his trumpeters sounded the signal for battle and his soldiers killed them where they stood. Four thousand people died in the days that followed, most of them for the crime of owning things.

Then he walked out in front of the citizens' assembly and offered himself as the savior of democracy. They elected him general with unlimited power and handed him the authority to cancel debts and redistribute land.

He ruled for twenty-eight years. He took the title of king. He died in 289 BC at seventy-two, in his own city, in his own bed, of what was probably cancer of the jaw.

Machiavelli put him in Chapter 8 of The Prince and did a strange thing with him. He refused to call Agathocles glorious. Slaughtering your fellow citizens, he wrote, abandoning faith and mercy, may win you an empire but never honor. Then, having registered the objection, he spent the rest of the chapter explaining the method: cruelty is used well when it is delivered all at once, out of necessity, and never repeated. Used badly it drips. Used well it ends, and people move on to their own concerns.

The moral objection and the instruction manual are in the same chapter. Only one of them is useful to a man deciding what to do on Tuesday.

Machiavelli did not have to go back to Sicily for this, incidentally. He had watched it done in person.

In the autumn of 1502 several of Cesare Borgia's own mercenary captains conspired against him, having noticed what he was. Borgia offered reconciliation. On December 31 he received them at Senigallia for a friendly settlement of the dispute, and four of them came: Vitellozzo Vitelli, Oliverotto da Fermo, Paolo Orsini, and Francesco Orsini, the Duke of Gravina. Once they were inside, Borgia stepped out of the room and his men surrounded them. That same night his executioner Michelotto Corella sat Vitellozzo and Oliverotto back to back on a bench and strangled them with a cord. The two Orsini were held at Castel della Pieve and strangled on January 18, 1503.

Machiavelli was standing in Senigallia when it happened, on assignment for Florence, and wrote home that he did not expect the prisoners to see morning. He was right. He then wrote it up in a short piece whose title is, in full, A Description of the Methods Adopted by the Duke Valentino when Murdering Vitellozzo Vitelli, Oliverotto da Fermo, the Signor Pagolo, and the Duke di Gravina Orsini.

Not a denunciation. A description of the methods.

Rule Two: Belong To Nobody

Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord was made Bishop of Autun in 1789. Within two years he had helped hand the Church's property to the state and been excommunicated for it. He served the Revolution. He served the Directory as foreign minister. He served Napoleon, who made him Grand Chamberlain.

Around 1807 he began taking money from Austria and Russia to sell Napoleon's secrets. At the Congress of Erfurt in 1808 he stood beside his emperor in public and coached Tsar Alexander in private on how to resist him. He had already cleared roughly ten million francs on the side from German rulers who wanted their borders drawn a particular way.

When Napoleon fell, Talleyrand engineered the return of the Bourbons and became foreign minister again. At the Congress of Vienna he showed up representing the defeated aggressor and talked France back to its 1792 borders with no reparations. On January 3, 1815, he signed a secret alliance with Britain and Austria against two of the powers he was ostensibly negotiating alongside. When the Bourbons fell in 1830 he became ambassador to Britain for the regime that replaced them.

Napoleon once told him to his face that he was shit in a silk stocking. Talleyrand said it was a pity so great a man had been so badly brought up.

He died on May 17, 1838, eighty-four years old, in his own house in Paris, having signed a statement that morning disavowing the errors by which he had troubled the Catholic Church. A priest gave him last rites. He was buried at his château.

Six regimes. Every one of them ended by force. He outlived all of them, because he was never actually in any of them.

Rule Three: Own The Burden Of Proof

This is the most important rule and almost nobody understands it.

Thomas Midgley Jr. found in 1921 that tetraethyl lead stopped engines from knocking. By the fall of 1924 the Bayway refinery in New Jersey had been making it for two months and five of its workers were dead, with others hallucinating and driven insane on the factory floor.

On October 30, 1924, Midgley called a press conference, poured the stuff over his hands, and breathed the vapor for a minute to demonstrate that it was safe. He had spent part of 1923 in Miami recovering from lead poisoning. He knew exactly what he was holding.

That is the posture. Not a lie, technically. A demonstration.

In 1925 the Public Health Service convened a conference on whether to put lead in gasoline at all, and Robert Kehoe, newly hired as chief medical adviser to the Ethyl Corporation, made the argument that won. A product this economically useful should not be discarded on the basis of opinion. If lead is harmful, the people saying so should produce the facts.

This is one of the most successful ideas of the twentieth century. He did not argue that lead was safe. He argued about who had to prove what. He put the burden of proof on those claiming it was unsafe. Absent proof of harm, a thing is permitted, and the proof has to come from somewhere, and in 1930 Kehoe became director of the Kettering Laboratory at the University of Cincinnati, the first university laboratory in America devoted to industrial toxicology, funded by General Motors, DuPont, and Ethyl. For decades it was the dominant source of research on lead toxicity in the United States, and its director was the industry's paid physician.

Those two facts were never in tension. They were the arrangement. The man arguing that lead was safe was paid to do so, and also possessed the primary means for proving the contrary.

Except Clair Patterson did prove him wrong. Patterson lost his federal research contracts. He was left off the 1971 National Research Council panel on airborne lead while being the world's leading authority on airborne lead. He died on December 5, 1995, less than a month before leaded gasoline was finally banned for American road vehicles.

Robert Kehoe died in Cincinnati on November 24, 1992, at ninety-nine years old, professor emeritus, in the city where his laboratory still stood.

Midgley did even better on the way through. After lead he invented the chlorofluorocarbons, marketed as Freon, which went into every refrigerator and air conditioner in the country and then went up and started taking the ozone layer apart. The historian J.R. McNeill concluded that he had more adverse impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in the history of the Earth. For this, the American Chemical Society gave him the Priestley Medal in 1941, the Willard Gibbs Award in 1942, and its presidency in 1944.

He died on November 2, 1944, at fifty-five, strangled by a rope-and-pulley rig he had invented to lift himself out of bed after polio, which the coroner ruled a suicide. This is the only instance in the entire file of a man being killed by his own work, and even then it was the wrong invention.

Do not argue about the truth. Arrange who has to prove it, and then be the only one with a laboratory.

Rule Four: Be Useful To Someone Stronger Than Your Victims

Wernher von Braun joined the Nazi Party on November 12, 1937, joined the SS in 1940, and held the rank of Sturmbannführer, a major, by June 1943. His V-2 rockets were assembled in a tunnel complex at Mittelwerk by prisoners from the Mittelbau-Dora camp. He visited many times and described the conditions as repulsive. Roughly twelve thousand people died building the weapon. It killed about nine thousand.

In 1945 the United States brought him over with some sixteen hundred other German scientists and technicians under Operation Paperclip. The FBI reviewed his party membership and found no derogatory information, concluding he had joined to advance his career or out of fear. He became an American citizen on April 15, 1955. Five weeks before that, forty million Americans had watched him on Walt Disney's Man in Space. He ran the Marshall Space Flight Center from 1960 to 1970, built the Saturn V, and received the National Medal of Science in 1975.

The record was never hidden. It was examined and priced. The rocket was worth more than the tunnel.

Kurt Waldheim concealed three years of Wehrmacht service in the Balkans, where prisoners were shot a few hundred meters from his office. He was Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1972 to 1981. In 1986, while running for president of Austria, the omissions surfaced in the middle of the campaign. Austria elected him anyway. On April 27, 1987, the United States put him on an immigration watchlist, the first sitting head of state ever placed on one, and he served out his full term to 1992 and died in 2007 at eighty-eight.

Henry Kissinger died on November 29, 2023, at one hundred, in his home in Connecticut, holding a Nobel Peace Prize awarded in 1973. He gave interviews until nearly the end. Governments consulted him.

Suharto was ranked by Transparency International in 2004 as the most corrupt leader in the world, with estimated losses to the Indonesian state of fifteen to thirty-five billion dollars. Prosecution was suspended in May 2006 on the grounds that he was too ill to stand trial. He died on January 27, 2008, at eighty-six, unconvicted.

Ferdinand Marcos fled the Philippines in 1986 and died in exile in Hawaii. Thirty-six years later his son was elected president of the country his family had looted.

In February 2021 the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declassified its assessment that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had approved an operation in Istanbul to capture or kill the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. On November 18, 2025, he sat in the Oval Office. A reporter raised the assessment and the president of the United States answered for him, saying he knew nothing about it and that they could leave it at that. They left it at that.

And on August 11, 2026, a Syrian court sentenced Bashar al-Assad to death in absentia for war crimes and crimes against humanity. He is living in Moscow, where Russia granted him asylum in December 2024. The sentence is real. So is the distance between Damascus and the apartment.

A verdict is a piece of paper. Protection is a place to live.

Rule Five: Let The Company Take The Hit

The modern innovation, and it is a genuine innovation, is that we invented a thing that can be punished instead of a person. Yet the Supreme Court has ruled it has the same rights as a person.

Angelo Mozilo made roughly $470 million running Countrywide through the housing bubble. In October 2010 he settled securities fraud and insider trading charges with the SEC for $67.5 million, of which Countrywide paid $20 million under an indemnification clause in his contract. He admitted no wrongdoing. In February 2011 federal prosecutors dropped the criminal investigation. He died at his home in Montecito in July 2023 at eighty-four.

John Stumpf left Wells Fargo in October 2016 with more than $130 million in career compensation after the bank opened millions of accounts customers never asked for. Regulators banned him from banking for life and fined him $17.5 million in January 2020, plus $2.5 million to the SEC later that year. No criminal charges. Thousands of employees who hit the sales targets he set were fired.

On April 14, 1994, seven tobacco executives told a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee under oath that nicotine is not addictive. The Justice Department opened a criminal perjury investigation that July, worked it for years, and indicted no one.

Boeing's 737 MAX killed 346 people in two crashes. The company signed a deferred prosecution agreement in 2021. In May 2025 the Justice Department agreed to a non-prosecution deal worth more than $1.1 billion, and Boeing no longer had to plead guilty to anything. Families of the dead objected. No one cared.

On May 1, 2026, the Purdue Pharma settlement took effect. The company is dissolved. The deal totals $7.4 billion, up to $6.5 billion of it from the Sackler family, who are permanently barred from selling opioids in the United States. It requires no admission of wrongdoing. Not one member of the family has been criminally charged. They still enjoy their billions while millions suffer from opioid addiction.

Rupert Murdoch sat for a deposition in the Dominion Voting Systems case and agreed, under oath, that Fox hosts had endorsed the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen. Bartiromo, yes. Pirro, he thought so. Dobbs, a lot. Hannity, a bit. Asked whether he could have told the network's chief executive and its stars to stop putting Rudy Giuliani's fraud claims on the air, he said: I could have. But I didn't.

On April 18, 2023, as the jury was being seated, Fox paid Dominion $787.5 million to end the case before opening statements. There was no on-air apology. Nobody was fired over it. The check came out of the company. Murdoch, who was ninety-two at the time, did not have to testify in front of anyone.

Then, in September 2025, after a Nevada probate official found that he and his son Lachlan had acted in bad faith trying to break the family trust, the Murdochs settled that too. Lachlan got control of Fox and News Corp. The other three children took $1.1 billion apiece and went away.

Found to have acted in bad faith. Kept the empire. Chose the heir.

Notice what the money is. It is not punishment. It is a price, quoted in advance, payable by the entity, and every one of these men kept the house.

Rule Six: Arrange It So The Only Thing They Can Take Is A Title

We have reached the current moment, which is the best environment for this work in living memory, because we have collectively decided that the record is the punishment.

In May 2024 a Manhattan jury convicted Donald Trump on thirty-four felony counts of falsifying business records. In November he was elected president. On January 10, 2025, Judge Juan Merchan sentenced him to unconditional discharge: no fine, no probation, no supervision, conviction intact and nothing attached to it. Ten days later he was inaugurated. A jury had already found him liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll and awarded her $5 million in 2023, and another awarded her $83.3 million for defamation in 2024, and the appeals held, and in July 2026 she was finally paid. A New York court found he had committed business fraud and ordered him to pay roughly $465 million, and on August 21, 2025, an appeals court threw the penalty out as excessive while leaving the findings and the officer-and-director ban standing.

Add it up and the man has a felony record, two civil verdicts, a fraud finding, and the most powerful office on Earth. Every one of those is real. Only one of them does anything.

Then there is Leon Black, who is the purest specimen currently available.

Black paid Jeffrey Epstein $170 million between 2012 and 2017. Epstein had been a registered sex offender since 2008. Black said the payments were for tax and estate planning, and an internal review by the law firm Dechert concluded the fees were for legitimate advisory work and found no evidence Black knew of or participated in Epstein's crimes. Senate investigators later turned up another $12 million Apollo's own review had missed, and in July 2025 Senator Ron Wyden asked the IRS to look at the tax side.

Black has denied every allegation ever made against him, and the civil suits went his way. Guzel Ganieva's was dismissed in 2023, and the dismissal upheld in January 2025, after Black had already paid her $18 million under a nondisclosure agreement. Cheri Pierson dropped hers in February 2024. In April 2026 a judge found that another plaintiff had falsified sonogram images and sanctioned her lawyer. Files released from the Epstein investigation show prosecutors examined accusations from several women beginning in 2019 and never found corroboration they could act on. He has never been charged with a crime.

So here is the entire bill. He stopped being chief executive of Apollo in January 2021 and left the firm in March. He gave up the chairmanship of the Museum of Modern Art. He is worth roughly $13.8 billion and runs his own money out of a family office.

He paid a convicted sex offender a hundred and seventy million dollars and it cost him a business card.

The pattern repeats down the tier. Andrew Mountbatten Windsor settled Virginia Giuffre's suit for a reported multimillion-pound sum in 2022 while admitting nothing, and was never charged with anything, and in late 2025 lost his princely title, his honors, and the lease on his house. Giuffre committed suicide, Andrew lost a title. Jes Staley, the JPMorgan executive who ran the Epstein relationship, was banned from senior roles by British regulators. JPMorgan itself paid $290 million to Epstein's victims in June 2023 and $75 million to the Virgin Islands that September, admitting no liability, and not one of its bankers was charged.

And Alexander Acosta, the United States Attorney who in 2008 gave Epstein thirteen months in county jail with work release and immunity for his co-conspirators, was made Secretary of Labor in 2017. He resigned in July 2019, not because of what he did, but because people had started reading it again.

Rule Seven: Never Make It About You

Now the failures, because they are the most instructive part of the file.

Bernie Madoff took 150 years and died in federal prison in 2021. Jeffrey Skilling got twenty-four years for Enron, negotiated it down to fourteen, and served twelve. Elizabeth Holmes is in federal prison. Sam Bankman-Fried got twenty-five years in 2024. Nicolae Ceaușescu was tried on December 25, 1989, in a proceeding that lasted about an hour, and shot against a wall minutes after the verdict. Muammar Gaddafi was killed in the street in Sirte on October 20, 2011. Charles Taylor is serving fifty years. Hissène Habré was convicted of crimes against humanity in 2016 and died in prison in 2021.

They did not fail because they were worse than the men in the sections above. Kissinger outranks most of them on body count and died full of years in Connecticut. They failed on execution, and the errors are consistent.

They committed crimes with their own names on them. Madoff's fraud was Madoff, personally, in a room, signing statements. There was no company to hand over instead of himself.

They hurt people with standing. Madoff stole from rich Americans with lawyers. Kehoe poisoned poor children who could not vote yet. Only one of those groups can reach you.

And they stopped being useful to anyone stronger. This is the whole of it. Ceaușescu ran out of protection and was dead in an afternoon. Habré was a Cold War asset until the Cold War ended. Taylor had no patron left by 2003. Assad still has one, and so the paper in Damascus stays paper.

Cesare Borgia is the oldest entry on that list. The trap at Senigallia worked exactly as designed, and it bought him nothing, because in August 1503 his father died and he was flat on his back with fever at the same hour, and the next pope but one was a man who had waited years to ruin him. He died at thirty-one in a Spanish ambush, stripped naked and left in the road. Machiavelli's verdict was that he had done everything correctly and simply had the bad luck to rent his protection from a dying man.

You can watch this happen in real time if you know what you are looking at. Rodrigo Duterte ran a drug war that killed thousands and was untouchable for as long as Manila wanted him untouchable. On March 11, 2025, a new administration handed him to the International Criminal Court, and he has been in a cell in The Hague ever since, with his trial approaching. Nothing he did changed. The people covering for him changed.

Andrew Mountbatten Windsor was accused publicly for years and nothing happened. The palace cut him loose in the autumn of 2025. On February 19, 2026, Thames Valley Police arrested him on suspicion of misconduct in public office over documents he had sent Epstein while serving as trade envoy. They questioned him all day and released him without charge. The conduct was sixteen years old. The arrest was four months after he stopped being a prince.

Which brings us to Ghislaine Maxwell, who is the single most useful data point in this entire article.

Run the Epstein operation through the machine and count the bodies. Epstein himself got thirteen months in county jail in 2008 with work release, and the prosecutor who gave it to him became Secretary of Labor. Black paid $170 million and lost a job title. Prince Andrew settled and lost a name. Staley lost a job. JPMorgan wrote two checks and admitted nothing. Out of all of it, across two decades and hundreds of girls, exactly one person is in prison: the woman.

Maxwell was convicted in December 2021 and sentenced to twenty years in June 2022. Then, on July 25, 2025, the deputy attorney general of the United States sat down and interviewed her personally. Seven days later the Bureau of Prisons moved her to Federal Prison Camp Bryan, a minimum-security camp in Texas, which its own policy says should not house someone with a sex offense conviction absent a waiver it has never explained. A senator demanded the documents in August 2025 and was still waiting the following June. Her projected release date is July 17, 2037.

She is the exception that proves the whole thing. She went to prison because she was the only one left holding it, and even she got moved somewhere nicer the week after she made herself useful again.

Nobody is punished for what they did. People are punished when they stop being worth protecting. We all have an inherent price to the right actors.

The Part Where This Is Supposed To Turn

Here is where I am supposed to reassure you. Where I point out that Patterson was right, and the lead came out of the gas. That Hugh Thompson got his medal, thirty years after he landed that helicopter. That Witold Pilecki got his name back four decades after the Polish secret police shot him in the back of the head. That history sorts it out. History does sort it out. It just does the sorting after everybody involved is past caring, and it does not return anything.

Being vindicated is not winning. Dying first is not a technicality. Kehoe got ninety-nine years, and Patterson missed the ban by three weeks, and both of those men were right about exactly one thing each. So run your own numbers.

The reward arrives now, and the bill arrives in forty years, addressed to someone else. The harm lands on people who were never in the room and could not have gotten into the room. Institutions do not reward truth, they reward usefulness. Between a man who solves the problem and a man who is the problem, no institution in recorded history has picked the second one. And the body that would have to punish you is the body you were protecting, which means the trial is the defendant grading his own exam, and every year he waits the price goes down, until the whole thing can be settled with a plaque and a check that the company writes.

That is the math. It has held for twenty-three centuries, and it is holding now.

Do with it what you want. I am not going to insult you by pretending the honest choice is also the smart one. It isn't. It never was. The only thing I can tell you is that most of the men in this article are all dead now, and so are most of the people they stepped on, and the difference between them is a few decades and a better obituary.

What is the right thing?